History: In January 1947 Winston Churchill finalised the "deal of the century" by selling his wartime memoirs to Lord Camrose, owner of the Daily Telegraph. Camrose had put together a worldwide consortium of publishers and newspapers to publish the account.
Few doubted the value of what they were getting. "Let's always remember", Andrew Heiskell of Life magazine told his staff, "that the Churchill memoirs are the biggest literary and historical project that Life, or for that matter any other publication, has ever undertaken". In today's money, Churchill had just signed a $50 million contract.
In Command of History tells the intriguing story of those war memoirs, totalling six volumes and two million words, published between 1948 and 1953. Reynolds examines the nefarious contractual negotiations, Churchill's battles with publishers, civil servants and his own demons during the writing process, and the reception of each volume. He looks at why the text established a benchmark for our understanding of the second World War. He also explains how the political sensitivities of the Cold War affected Churchill's presentation of the earlier conflict. So Gen Eisenhower, who Churchill thought an overrated dullard, is spared in the later volumes by virtue of the fact that by the 1950s he was president of the US.
All these complex strands are beautifully drawn together in a book that is as cleverly organised as it is elegantly written. It is also stylistically imaginative. When dealing with the memoirs themselves, Reynolds adopts the present tense ("Churchill tells his readers"), which adds both clarity and immediacy.
In Command of History is an exceptional achievement. Churchillian in drama and power, it grips the reader throughout with a forceful narrative (including, naturally, the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning).
Perhaps the most fascinating question is the extent to which Churchill did or did not actually write the memoirs. Reynolds shows that most of the text was drafted by a team of researchers - "the Syndicate" - who did all the work up to the proofs stage, when Churchill finally weighed in. Poorly paid and barely acknowledged, they would grind their way through tedious official documents turning dry third-person accounts into dramatic first-person narratives. Thus "Marshal Stalin asked what were the prime minister's views on Hungary" became "Stalin asked what I thought of Hungary".
Yet, says Reynolds, the collaborative nature of the memoirs does not make them any less Churchill's.
"The writing of history and biography is often the work of a lone scholar but in science it is the norm for a major figure to direct a research group," he writes. "Churchill did not do all the work personally, but he set its parameters, guided its direction and sustained its momentum."
When Denis Kelly, a member of the Syndicate, was asked if the great man had really written his own memoirs, he responded that it was "almost as superficial a question 'as asking a master chef: Did you cook the whole banquet with your own hands?' Or the 'man who won the war' whether he did all the fighting by himself.
Churchill did not labour over every word, but it is impossible to read the memoirs without hearing his voice and influence. Take the dramatic account of the moment in May 1940 when he knew that France was lost.
"Outside in the garden of the Quai d'Orsay, clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires, and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheelbarrows of archives on to them," he writes. "Already, therefore, the evacuation of Paris was being prepared."
As Reynolds comments: "it is a superbly artful passage - vivid vignettes, expressing fundamental truths". While those frail old gentlemen, relics of another age, laboured with their wheelbarrows, German tanks were hurtling west to take the French capital.
Revisionist historians have since debunked many of the claims Churchill made in his memoirs. Yet they have failed, particularly in Britain and the US, to dislodge from the popular imagination that self-perpetuated image of Churchill as an incomparable war leader. If anything, his iconic status is growing. A public vote held by the BBC named Churchill as the greatest-ever Briton. Rudolph Giuliani spoke publicly after 9/11 about drawing inspiration from Churchill's leadership in 1940. President Bush keeps a bust of Churchill in his private study.
"In death, as in life, Winston Churchill continues to glow," writes David Reynolds in the conclusion to this fine book. "He remains in command of history."
In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds, Penguin/Allen Lane, 646pp. £30